Swedish church allows gay weddings: CEN 10.22.09

First published in The Church of England Newspaper The general synod of the Church of Sweden has authorized same-sex weddings. On Oct 22 the Kyrkomötet, the Church’s governing assembly, voted 176 to 73 to endorse the recommendation of its Central Board to solemnize gay marriages after Swedish civil law on May 1 granted same-sex couples the right to marry. Marriage “is a social institution regulated by public authorities. From a perspective of theology of creation, the marriage has the purpose to support the internal relation between spouses and give a safe setting for the children growing up,” the Central Board said in its recommendation to adopt gay marriage rites.

The Kyrkomötet vote “takes a stance in favour of an inclusive view of people. Regardless of whether one is religious or not, this affects the entire social climate and the view of people’s equal value,” said the head of the country’s largest gay rights group, Åsa Regnér of the Swedish Association for Sexuality Education (RFSU).

In the run up to the vote, conservative members of the Church of Sweden had urged the Kyrkomötet not to “cuff off the church from its roots. The Church of Sweden will now be transformed into a congregational denomination, whose teaching is formulated by simple majority decisions, and where the Bible is being used arbitrarily or even entirely removed in order to legitimize the decisions taken,” said Pastor Yngve Kalin of the Church Coalition for Bible and Confession.

Traditionalist members of the Kyrkomötet had argued that same-sex marriage violated Scripture and the Church’s traditional teachings on marriage and also imperiled ecumenical relations. The Church of England is in communion with the Church of Sweden through the 1992 Porvoo Common Statement.

Writing to the Archbishop of Uppsala on behalf of the Archbishops’ Council of the Church of England, the Rt. Rev. Christopher Hill on behalf of the Council for Christian Unity and the Rt. Rev. John Hind on behalf of the Faith and Order Advisory Group said the adoption of gay marriage by the Swedish church would be “problematic.”

The “teaching and discipline” of the Anglican Communion was that “it is not right either to bless same-sex sexual relationships or to ordain those who are involved in them,” the Archbishops’ Council said on June 26, 2009.

Gay marriage was a “fundamental re-definition of marriage and of basic Christian anthropology.” Making marriage gender neutral was “at odds with the Biblical teaching about the significance of God’s creation of human beings as male and female as this has been received by the Church of England and by the Catholic tradition in general,” the bishops said.

The adoption of gay marriage by the Swedes would also have “immediate and negative ecumenical consequences” and would “lead to the impairment of the relationships” with “particular limitations of the inter-changeability of ordained ministry.”

However, traditionalists in the Kyrkomötet siad the outcome of the gay marriage vote was all but certain due to the politicized nature of its general synod.

“The Church of Sweden is permeated by the same political parties that constitute the parliament. The majority of the members of the Church of Sweden Governing Body have party labels, as have those who are members of the Church of Sweden General Synod, and they usually follow their party lines on decisive issues,” Pastor Kalin said.

In the Church of Sweden, “theology has been transformed into an ideology and the church’s own institutions happily provide theological post-constructions to the latest opinions and whims of the world,” he said.

Pastor Kalin said that “for the church, this is devastating” as the “faith, confession and teaching of the Church of Sweden” rested “on political majorities or on the currently fancy views of the world.”

The proposed changes will likely take the form of the modification of the marriage liturgy, replacing “man and wife” with “lawfully wedded spouses” for same-sex couples and follows upon the 2005 vote to amend the title of Chapter 23 of its prayer book, from “Marriage” to “Marriage and Blessings” to permit blessing of same-sex civil unions. Pastors will be permitted the option of refusing to perform same-sex marriages; however, traditionalists worry that this conscious clause will be abrogated in future sessions of the synod as past guarantees respecting the conscious of those opposed to women clergy were rescinded.